Meryle Secrest

  Modigliani, at right, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, accompanied by Paul Guillaume and, possibly, the wife of the sculptor Alexander Archipenko (image credit 12.4)

  Survage was always concerned about Modigliani’s drinking and, in an effort to stop him, told him he was an alcoholic. Modigliani reacted with indignation, but for three days he drank nothing. On the fourth, he rolled in, completely drunk. Survage, trying to get him to see reason, persuaded him to make the arduous walk to Villefranche, a village along the coast, which Modigliani did. They had a delicious dinner and drank a moderate amount of wine. Whether the lesson had the intended effect is not recorded.

  Modigliani, Jeanne, and Eudoxie first took an apartment together on the rue Masséna. The author of Le Silence éternel, the companion volume for the exhibition “Le Couple Tragique,” believes that Modigliani and his future mother-in-law began on the best of terms. A drawing, by Modigliani and Hébuterne, along with a watercolor by her, takes the theme of lovers in a garden, and at lunch, watched over by her mother. This idyllic scene did not last long, if we are to believe Jeanne Modigliani, who was scrupulous in such matters. She writes that Amedeo then moved into the first in a series of hotels, the Tarelli, on the rue de France. According to Survage, he was not there long, but kept moving, using his time-honored, fail-safe method of avoiding a bill by making so much noise that he was evicted. Modigliani moved because, according to Jeanne Modigliani, “relations between [him] and [Eudoxie] became more and more strained.” It seems likely, even inevitable, that, given all that had happened and all the secrets she had been forced to hide, Eudoxie would have expressed anger and frustration at what she would have considered a major family crisis. In any event Survage claimed that not only did he himself see little of Jeanne, but that at one time Modigliani also saw her rarely. “He took a coffee with her and then put her on the tram so she could go back to her mother. He never saw the mother.” The explanation for that was simple, according to Survage. For Modigliani everything was secondary to his art, even Hébuterne. “He had no other attachment.”

  The military threat to Paris was slowly receding. The Germans won two battles in April against the British and the French, which were followed by a French counterattack in July, and in August the British broke through the German lines. Paris must have looked safer and safer but Jeanne and her mother stayed on in the south. André, just twenty when the war started, joined the infantry, was wounded, was decorated twice, and kept a war diary. From it Marc Restellini was able to chart his leaves home. On one of those visits, in October 1917, when Jeanne was already secretly living with Modigliani, André makes no mention of the fact, a sign that he was as unaware of the true nature of affairs as his parents. However, when his next leave came, in the summer of 1918, he went directly to Nice, but Jeanne was nowhere to be found, which naturally upset him very much. As for the coming birth, that, too, was a closely guarded secret.

  René Gimpel, whose Diary of an Art Dealer begins in 1918, was out on the Paris streets the day of the Armistice, November 11. “The crowd had doubled; incredibly, the joy had multiplied a hundredfold,” he wrote a day later. “Women were going wild but keeping their heads. I did not see a single drunk. Kissing, much kissing, but only a birds-of-passage sort of thing. The American soldiers are the most feted.” Baby Jeanne, Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani’s firstborn, was on the point of entering the world. Yet little about the circumstances surrounding her arrival is clear. Lunia Czechowska states that Modigliani returned to Paris in the summer before she was born, which would suggest that he was not in Nice for the birth. But from other details it is clear that the usually reliable guide is off by a year. Artist Quarter, misleading in this as in much else, claims that Eudoxie, in a fit of final exasperation at Jeanne and her fiancé, slammed the door on both and took up residence alone in the “California” area of Nice. Whereas Jeanne Modigliani has established that her father was long gone. Furthermore the address given for Jeanne Hébuterne on her baby’s birth certificate is 155 avenue de la Californie; obviously, she and her mother were living there together.

  Artist Quarter also tells a story, repeated by Sichel, that on the night little Jeanne was born her father, ecstatic, rushed out of the hospital on his way to the Mairie. But somehow he had to have a drink first and never got there. When he thought of it again, it was too late, and the next day he forgot.

  It makes a good story, one more nail in the coffin of this feckless drunk who cannot even manage to register his own daughter’s birth. The truth is otherwise. Contrary to published statements a birth certificate does exist. It was issued three days later, on December 2, 1918, in the presence of the baby herself. She was taken to the town hall by a nurse, Rose Villars, who provided the necessary information. This same document was carefully annotated for decades and charts the future legal and marital status of the little girl who, for the moment, was simply “Jeanne,” the daughter of Jeanne Hébuterne.

  So much speculation and outright invention has grown up around the Hébuterne story that even today, details are sparse, and if further amplification does exist it is closely guarded. What is known is that André went to Nice as soon as he could, arriving on December 16, 1918. Only then did he discover that his unmarried sister had given birth two weeks before. “He saw that as proof”—of her disloyalty?—“and did not hide his anger,” Restellini wrote. One can imagine what this confrontation with her brother did to Jeanne’s state of mind. What was said: That she had brought shame and dishonor on her family? That she had committed a crime? How could she choose between her brother and her lover? As for her mother, the collapse of her plan to avoid having her husband find out must have been a crushing blow. What seemed to have upset André particularly was that he was the one who had to write to tell his father about the birth. The lengths both women went to in order to avoid a confrontation speaks volumes about their fear of what would happen if the truth were known. After the men found out anyway the uproar went on for months. A trust had been broken that never would be restored. Restellini reported, based on André’s diary, that relations between brother and sister continued to deteriorate, reaching their nadir during four days at the end of April 1919. Was he physically violent? Was Jeanne told, as rumor has claimed, that her family wanted nothing more to do with her? Luc Prunet said that for the rest of his life his grandfather “would close up like an oyster” whenever the subject of Jeanne was mentioned. Perhaps he felt that too much had been said already. “But he also told me, ‘If I had been there at the time this never would have happened.’ ”

  CHAPTER 13

  “Life Is a Gift”

  Quelle est cette île triste et noire?—C’est Cythère

  —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “Un Voyage à Cythère”

  THE PERSON who did welcome the arrival of baby Jeanne was her father. Lunia Czechowska recalled, “Modigliani was absolutely thrilled. He adored this baby and nothing else in the world existed for him except her. He never stopped talking about her beauty and charm. He did not exaggerate; I’ve never seen such a pretty baby, blonde, plump, ravishing eyes a nutty brown, long curly eyelashes and a delicious little mouth.” Writing back to his mother, to whom he had sent the news of Jeanne’s birth, he said, “The baby is well and so am I. You have always been so much of a mother that I am not surprised at your feeling like a grandmother, even outside the bonds of matrimony.” It was not so long ago that unwanted babies, especially illegitimate ones, were bundled off to wet nurses in obscure villages who could be depended upon to starve them until they died. Modigliani must have been well aware of this common practice because he went to very great trouble, according to Czechowska, to find a genuinely loving substitute for Jeanne’s mother.

  This was necessary because when she was three weeks old her mother claimed she could do nothing with her and neither, she said, could her mother. She was inexperienced, the birth had been tiring, and someone subjected to such a drumbeat of disapproval could be forgiven if she was not particularly
delighted by the new arrival. She was “not much of a mother,” Jeanne told Aniouta. With a half smile she rated herself as a zero, indicating the score with her fingers. On the other hand, “As a husband Modigliani was very good,” her mother said. André began referring to his sister as their “lost ewe” and wrote a note in his diary about how his dear little mother had kept all of her sorrow and resentment bottled up for so long. How sad it all was.

  Modigliani, by contrast, was full of new energy. At the end of May, leaving Jeanne still in Nice, he returned to Paris. According to Lunia Czechowska, he was looking better, had stopped drinking, and was being careful about his health, because he had a daughter to live for. He was living a normal life. She wrote, “I have kept a lovely souvenir of our long conversations while I was posing for my portraits.” (He painted her repeatedly.) “He talked about anything and everything, his mother, Livorno and above all his darling baby. He had this simple and touching dream, to go back to Italy, live near his mother and get his health back. He would not be completely happy until he had a proper apartment with a real dining room, and his daughter beside him, in short, living like anyone else. His exuberant imagination spun endless dreams.”

  Meanwhile he was working at top speed. Modigliani painted as many portraits of Hanka, Zborowski’s companion, servants, adolescent boys, mothers with babies, and, in particular, small girls. There is an unusually large, almost lifesize painting of an eight- or nine-year-old that perfectly expresses his enchanting ability to paint adorable subjects without ever descending into sentimentality. She just stands there, looking at the viewer, her hands clasped, wearing a long blue dress, a ribbon in her hair, and an appealing expression. Could he have been thinking of the little girl Jeanne would one day become? Canvas after canvas was finished with lightning speed because, that summer, something stupendous was about to happen. He was going to show nine paintings and fifty drawings in London.

  Paris in 1919 was “sad and beautiful,” Margaret MacMillan wrote in Paris 1919. “Signs of the war that had just ended were everywhere: the refugees from the devastated regions in the north; the captured German cannon in the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées; the piles of rubble and boarded-up windows where German bombs had fallen … The great windows in the cathedral of Notre-Dame were missing their stained glass, which had been stored for safety; in their place, pale yellow panes washed the interior with a tepid light. There were severe shortages of coal, milk and bread.”

  On the other hand the weather was perfection. Encouraged by a heavy rainfall the grass was lush and spring flowering bulbs were at their peak. “Along the quais the crowds gathered to watch the rising waters, while buskers sang of France’s great victory over Germany and of the new world that was coming.” After a year in the south of France Jeanne was at last ready to return. A close dating reveals that Modigliani returned to Paris on May 31. Three weeks later, on June 24, Jeanne sent him a telegram, care of Zborowski, asking for her train fare home. That apparently came quickly because she returned a week later, accompanied by her mother. Curiously, André’s diary does not record that the family was back together again until July 13. It was a Sunday, at seven in the morning. “The father seemed thrilled to recover his family,” Restellini wrote. “André described an apartment in total chaos.” There was no mention of a baby in the family gathering and none either of what Jeanne must have known by then, that she was expecting another child. However, the discovery must have precipitated a curious note that Modigliani signed on July 7, promising to marry “Mlle Jane Hebuterne” (sic), “as soon as the documents arrive.” (This was, presumably, a reference to legal papers from Italy.) Marevna, who saw him shortly after he returned, thought he had gained weight. He seemed in good spirits and was joking about becoming a father for the second time. “It’s unbelievable. It’s sickening!”

  During the month before Jeanne and the baby returned, Modigliani would take Lunia for long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens—it was very hot that summer. Sometimes they went to the cinema and ended up dining at Rosalie’s. He was always talking about returning to Italy and the little girl he would never see grow up. He was also talking about London. The great international world of art and artists was coming back to life. In particular, the most important exhibition of French art in London in almost a decade was taking place that summer. The location was, curiously enough, in a department store, Heal’s, that had opened an art gallery two years before. Since the gallery was just underneath its mansard roof it was named the Mansard Gallery. Some thirty-nine artists—Dufy, Kisling, Léger, Matisse, Picasso, and many others—were represented. Modigliani, with fifty-nine works, had the most in the show. He was becoming as well known in London as in Paris; examples of his sculpture, shown at the Whitechapel Gallery five years before, had been singled out for special mention in avant-garde circles. It is also clear that British critics saw his worth long before the Paris critics did. (One wonders: was it because, being less corrupt, they did not have to be paid?) The first real discussion of Modigliani’s art was not published in Paris but in London by the discerning artist and critic Roger Fry. Furthermore the catalog for the Mansard Gallery was written by the well-known writer Arnold Bennett, who remarked, “I am determined to say that the four figure subjects of Modigliani seem to me to have a suspicious resemblance to masterpieces.” Other glowing comments followed. The Observer wrote, “Modigliani stands in front … and shows a strong alliance with the early Florentine painters.” The Burlington Magazine recorded, “Modigliani’s uncommon feeling for character finds expression through an extreme simplification of colour and contour and the most astonishing distortions.”

  The English artist-critic Roger Fry, c. 1925 (image credit 13.1)

  The critics in London were not alone in appreciating Modigliani. Osbert Sitwell wrote that he and his brother, Sacheverell, had organized the Mansard Gallery show in collaboration with Zborowski. Sitwell wrote, “With flat, Slavonic features, brown almond-shaped eyes, and a beard which might have been shaped out of beaver’s fur, ostensibly he was a kind, soft businessman, and a poet as well. He had an air of melancholy, to which the fact that he spoke no English, and could not find his way about London … added.” Sitwell continued, “Rather than the great established names, and famous masters, it was the newcomers, such artists as Modigliani and Utrillo, who made the sensation in this show.” As a reward for their services Zborowski offered them a single picture from the show at a wholesale price. The Sitwells chose Modigliani’s “superb” Peasant Girl, which they bought for the very great bargain of four pounds. The average gallery price for one of his paintings at the time was between thirty and a hundred pounds.

  It was Modigliani’s moment of triumph. Suddenly everybody who was anybody wanted a Modigliani. Bennett bought a nude and a portrait of Czechowska. Years later all kinds of collectors would claim to have been the first to appreciate his work. One of them was Hugh Blaker, a painter, writer, art critic, and collector who records in his diary that Zborowski appeared in London in 1919 (apparently before the show) carrying several oils stripped of their stretchers and frames to avoid freight charges. He unrolled them on the floor and Blaker immediately bought four; one, Le Petit Paysan, is now in the Tate Gallery collection. “So far as I know I was the only man in London to care a tuppeny damn about ’em.” Another pair of eyes spotted Le Petit Paysan and appreciated it before Blaker did. He was the young Kenneth Clark, future British art historian, author, television personality, and museum official. Clark, then aged sixteen, had been given the handsome present of one hundred pounds and told to buy a picture. This painting of a young peasant boy caught his interest. “It seemed ridiculous to buy the first picture I saw, but after a long search I could find nothing I liked so well, so I timidly asked the price. It was sixty pounds and the painter’s name was Modigliani.” But when he got back to his parents’ elegant flat in Berkeley Square he realized that the choice was never going to fit among all their gilt-framed Barbizon paintings. As he recorded, Bl
aker bought it instead and eventually sold it to the Tate. In the end everyone was better off, except, of course, the young collector.

  That August of 1919 Modigliani should have been in London but had contracted another bout of influenza and was too ill to travel. The Sitwells were then given a firsthand demonstration of the cutthroat world of the Paris art market. “I recall how, during the period of the exhibition, when Modigliani, recovering from a serious crisis of his disease, suffered a grave relapse, a telegramme came for Zborowski,” Osbert Sitwell wrote. Zborowski then came to the Sitwells with a message that all sales should be put on hold. In this case, he was doing the bidding of Paul Guillaume, who owned most of the works in the show and knew the prices would double and triple if and when Modigliani died. It seemed callous in the extreme, but as Guillaume’s biographer, Colette Giraudon, pointed out, it was a kind of compliment; the market had now decided that whether Modigliani lived or died was a matter of some importance. In any event, as Sitwell drily concluded, “Modigliani did not immediately comply with the program drawn up for him.”

  Time and again Modigliani had cheated death, but this time the odds were hopelessly stacked against him. Few people know that tuberculosis, a bacillus that primarily attacks the lungs, can migrate anywhere in the body and can infect the spine, lymph nodes, genitourinary tract, gastrointestinal, or peritoneum, and so on. In Modigliani’s case the bacillus went to the brain. Tubercular (or tuberculous) meningitis, the cause of death cited on his death certificate, is an infection of the meninges, the membrane covering the brain and spinal cord, and was, in the early twentieth century, the most widespread form of meningitis. Nowadays it can be rapidly cured with antibiotics, but if left untreated it leads to blindness and death. In adults it is an outgrowth of pulmonary tuberculosis, exacerbated by malnutrition, excessive alcohol and drug use, or other disorders that compromise the immune system. The British Medical Research Council has identified three stages in the development of the disease, going from headaches, general apathy, irritability, fever, and loss of appetite to delirium and coma.